New York City, N.Y., Feb 13, 2015 / 04:02 am (CNA).- Questions
are being raised over two U.S. foundations that have poured more than three
million dollars into abortion rights, LGBT activist, and legal groups to push
the message that exemptions based on religious beliefs are “un-American” and an
abuse of liberty.

The Arcus
Foundationand the Ford Foundationhave spent over $3 million in combined spending
against religious liberty exemptions since 2013, according to a CNA review of
tax forms and grant listings.

John Lomperis of the Institute for Religion and Democracy– a D.C.-based ecumenical Christian think tank –
warned that the grants appear to understand the important role of “rhetorical
message and framing” on religious liberty issues.

“The agenda of such groups in opposing basic conscience protections could
hardly be more diametrically opposed to our nation's great traditions of
freedom of conscience and of religion,” Lomperis, who serves as United
Methodist Director for the institute, told CNA Feb. 10.

He contended that the pattern of grants “serves a fundamentally totalitarian
vision these foundations and their allied politicians have of 'religious
liberty.'” This vision is especially opposed to those who value traditional
sexual morality and respect for unborn human life, he noted.

“Our society is now facing serious questions about to what extent Christians
(as well as, to a lesser extent, followers of other faiths) will be allowed to
have the same degree to live in accordance with our values without facing new
and powerful coercions,” Lomperis said.

The Arcus Foundation's website lists a 2014 grant of $100,000 to the American Civil
Liberties Foundationsupporting
“communications strategies to convince conservative Americans that religious
exemptions are 'un-American.'” A two-year Arcus grant to the ACLU in 2013 gave
$600,000 to support the ACLU's Campaign to End the Use of Religion to
Discriminate. Arcus Foundation tax forms describe this as a “multi-pronged”
effort to combat “the growing trend of institutions and individuals claiming
exemptions from anti-discrimination laws because of religious objections.”

The Arcus Foundation is a major funder of LGBT advocacy, including “gay
marriage” advocacy. The foundation had almost $170 million in assets in 2013
and gave out $17 million to organizations it considers to be working for social
justice.

As part of this effort, the foundation joined with the titanic wealth of the
Ford Foundation to back Columbia Law School’s “Public Rights / Private
Conscience Project,” run by the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law. The Arcus
Foundation gave $250,000 to Columbia University’sBoard of Trustees to support the project, which the foundation says will
“mobilize scholars, attorneys and advocates in order to develop and distribute
new methods of framing perceived conflicts between sexual rights and religious
liberty.”

Columbia University announced the project in a March 24, 2014 statement that
acknowledged funding from both foundations. The announcement mentioned as
examples of religious exemptions the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Supreme
Court cases objecting to including HHS-mandated abortifacient contraceptives in
employee health plans. The announcement also cited efforts to accommodate
religious objections to “gay marriage.”

The project criticized the Supreme Court's June 2014 decision in favor of Hobby
Lobby. The project also spearheaded a letter from over 50 legal scholars that
called on President Barack Obamato
deny a religious exemption clause in a controversial executive order
prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual
orientation and gender identity.

The Ford Foundation's 2013 tax forms and website indicate it has committed
$650,000 to the same project, which the foundation says will “counteract
religious exemption and conscience-based carve-outs to laws securing sexual and
reproductive rights.” The grant money also supports “a symposia series on LGBT
rights.”

The Ford Foundation has assets of $11 billion and dispenses $500 million in
grants each year. The foundation's president, Darren Walker, sits on the Arcus
Foundation’s eight-member board of directors. Walker is a past vice president
of foundation initiatives of the Rockefeller Foundation, another titan of
non-profit foundations involved in social change.

Lomperis noted many current controversies involving religious liberty: campus
ministries have been “kicked off of campus” because of their Christian
commitments; Christians in wedding-related industries have been threatened with
fines and jail time for declining business that would involve taking part in
“gay weddings”; health care professionals face pressure to perform elective
abortions against their pro-life beliefs; and parents increasingly face
difficulties exempting their children from school programs “intentionally
designed to cure children of traditional Christian values around sexual
morality.”

“It seems that with such grants, recently and historically, essentially secular
liberal funders like those at the Arcus and Ford Foundations are trying their
best to undercut the pro-life and pro-traditional marriage movements,” Lomperis
added.

The Ford Foundation gave at least one other grant targeting religious liberty.
Its 2013 grant of $150,000 to Political Research Associates supported “public
education and strategic communications on religious liberties exemptions from
nondiscrimination laws,” in addition to what the foundation characterized as
education on the “export of homophobia abroad” as portrayed in the Ford
Foundation-backed film “God Loves Uganda.”

Funding for efforts to reframe religious liberty extend even further.

In 2014 the Arcus Foundation granted $400,000 to the Center for American Progressto back the center’s Faith and Progressive Policy
Initiative in order to “articulate and disseminate a socially progressive
framework of religious liberty as it relates to a range of issues” while
working with “a diverse group of faith leaders, partners and allies.” The
website of the center and its affiliated political action fund’s publication
ThinkProgress criticize efforts to secure legal protections for those with
religious objections to the HHS mandate or to the recognition of same-sex
relationships.

Lomperis was skeptical of such efforts.

“With the specific battles these foundations are choosing to pick, it seems
clear that they are hoping to confuse the public with a few prominently touted
and ridiculously unrepresentative spokespeople claiming that not even ‘the
religious community’ or ‘Christian leaders’ want these necessary
religious-liberty protections being debated,” he said.

The Arcus Foundation has also supported pro-abortion rights groups opposed to
religious freedom exemptions. Tax forms indicate it gave $500,000 to the Planned
Parenthood Federation of Americato
“expand monitoring and analysis of organized opposition to rights, information
and services related to sexual orientation, gender identity and reproductive
health, as well as working to prevent expanded use of religious exemptions in
policy.”

Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in the U.S. and was
responsible for over 325,000 abortions in Fiscal Year 2014.

The Arcus Foundation was created in Kalamazoo, Michigan by Jon Stryker, an heir
to the fortune of the Stryker Corporation. The foundation has offices in New
York City and Cambridge, England.

Stryker’s foundation has committed strategic funding to combating what it sees
as “the abuse of religion to deny protection to LGBT people.” The foundation’s
website says it aims to counter “the abuse of religious freedoms through ‘religious
exemptions,’ and develop religious and legal strategies to hold exemptions in
check.”

The foundation aims to “challenge religious opponents of LGBT people in the
U.S. and internationally” and to develop communications strategies to counter
“some religious institutions” which it says engage in “the discrimination and
dehumanization of LGBT people.” Its grant priorities aim to use “multiple
change levers” like “leadership development, alliance-building, policy change,
culture change, and resource development.”

The Arcus Foundation’s 2013 grant of $50,000 to the Interfaith Alliance was
intended to build “a faith network opposing discriminatory religious freedom
exemptions,” which the foundation claims to be “harmful.” In 2014, the
foundation gave $75,000 to Faithful America, a petition and activism website,
to support “public campaigns that activate Christian grassroots advocacy
networks to present a faith-based challenge to religious institutions and
leaders that abuse religious freedom.”

The National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health received a $100,000 grant
in 2013 to build its own capacities and to build a “cross-movement alliance” in
order to “combat policies with religious exemptions.” Another $100,000 went to
the northwestern U.S.-based Pride Foundation in 2014 to “coordinate messaging”
on religious exemptions.

A 2014 grant of $100,000 to the Gill Foundationbacked
the Movement Advancement Project’s “research and messaging on religious
exemptions.” The project is a strategy group that has previously helped the two
foundations collaborate to advance LGBT advocacy within U.S. religious
denominations, seminaries, clergy coalitions and media to counter religious
opposition.

The Colorado-based Gill Foundation was founded by the politically savvy former
businessman Tim Gill, a collaborator with Arcus Foundation president Jon
Stryker’s sister Pat Stryker. Gill has pursued a long-term political strategy
of advancing LGBT causes by targeting small local and statewide political races
to train the talent pool of his opponents.

The Arcus Foundation’s current executive director, Kevin Jennings, is a former
assistant deputy of the U.S. Department of Education, where he headed the
Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools. Jennings is the founder of the Gay, Lesbian
and Straight Education Network(GLSEN),
which has advanced LGBT activism in thousands of U.S. secondary schools.
Jennings reportedly was a member of the homosexual anti-AIDS group ACT UP in
the mid-1990s, just a few years after the group’s notorious anti-Catholic
protests in New York City.

Jennings is on the 25-member Board of Trustees of Union Theological Seminary, a
historically prominent mainline Protestant seminary with links to Columbia
University.

The Arcus Foundation has backed the Equally Blessed Coalition, an organization
of Catholic dissenting groups which have attacked the U.S. Conference of
Catholic Bishops and the Knights of Columbus for supporting legal marriage as a
union of one man and one woman. Through the group Dignity USA, the coalition
also received an Arcus grant of $200,000 in 2014 “to support pro-LGBT faith
advocates to influence and counter the narrative of the Catholic Churchand its ultra-conservative affiliates” as well as
to “build advocacy and visibility in connection with two special events, the
Synod of the Family and World Youth Day.”

The Arcus Foundation is also a partner of the U.S. State Department’s Global
Equality Fund, having pledged $1 million to support U.S. government-backed LGBT
activism worldwide.

Ford Foundation

Cecile Richards
is a trustee at the Ford Foundation,
and the president of the Planned
Parenthood Federation of America.

Note: Faye Wattleton was
the president of the Planned Parenthood
Federation of America, and is a trustee at Columbia University.

Open
Society Foundations was a funder for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the Human Rights Watch, the Center
for American Progress, the Tides
Foundation, and the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU).

George
Soros is the founder & chairman for the Open Society Foundations, was the chairman for the Foundation to Promote Open Society, and
was a benefactor for the Human Rights
Watch.

Foundation
to Promote Open Society was a funder for the Human Rights Watch, the Center
for American Progress, the Tides
Foundation, the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU), the NAACP
Legal Defense & Educational Fund, and Aspen Institute (think tank).

Benedict
XVI is the pope emeritus for the Roman
Catholic Church, and was an associate of Richard John Neuhaus.

Richard John
Neuhaus was an associate of Benedict
XVI, and a director at the Institute
on Religion and Democracy.

Arcus Foundation
was a funder for the Human Rights Watch,
the Center for American Progress,
and the Tides Foundation.

Patrick J. Murphy
is a senior fellow at the Center for
American Progress, and was a co-chair for the Catholic advisory committee to 2008 Obama campaign.

Lisa Sowle
Cahill was a member of the Catholic
advisory committee to 2008 Obama campaign, and the president of the Catholic Theological Society of America.

Kevin Jennings
is an executive director for the Arcus
Foundation, and was the founder & executive director for the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

Anthony D. Romero
is an executive director for the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a director at the National Women's Law Center, and was a director of human rights for
the Ford Foundation.

Sherrilyn Ifill
is a director at the National Women's
Law Center, the president & director-counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund,
and was the chair, U.S. programs for the Open
Society Foundations.

Open
Society Foundations was a funder for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton
Foundation.

George
Soros is the founder & chairman for the Open Society Foundations.

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